Luminous Ventures has made a £1million investment in Optellum, developers of the world’s first AI clinical diagnosis support software for personalized early lung cancer diagnosis and treatment.

End-to-end sales acceleration platform Cognism has raised $10m in Series B funding for its next-generation sales acceleration solution, bringing its total funding to just over $16.5m. The round was led by New York-based PeakSpan Capital.  Founded in 2016 by James Isilay (CEO), an expert in algorithmic technologies, natural language processing and machine learning, alongside Stjepan Buljat (CTO), Cognism has seen rapid growth since raising initial funding in 2017, with ARR growth of over 4x in 2018.

Tyk Technologies Ltd, creators of an industry-leading API gateway and management platform, has secured £4m in Series A funding, led by MMC Ventures to accelerate its business securing, simplifying and scaling organisations’ API programmes.

The MMC Ventures-led Series A funding will be used to accelerate Tyk’s presence in rapidly-growing markets, specifically the US, where the company has established itself as the key challenger brand in the API space against competitors like Google’s Apigee, CA Technologies, and IBM. Tyk will be opening an office in Atlanta this summer to add to the Singapore office opened in 2017.

The latest research from eFront, the leading financial software and solutions provider dedicated to Alternative Investments, shows that reaching the hurdle rate 

A fast growing manufacturing firm based in Merseyside has received an initial investment of £7.5m from BGF, the UK and Ireland’s most active investor in growing businesses, to support its expansion. This deal marks BGF’s commitment of a total of £2 billion into UK and Irish SMEs, including £280m for companies based in the North West. 

The Qube the capital’s coworking studio complex for creatives has announced a £1.9m funding round led by the Angel CoFund, UK music industry veterans AEI Group, and a strategic cohort of angel investors including co-founder of Mixcloud, Nikhil Shah, and ex-MD and co-founder of Investec, Bernard Kantor. The funding will be used to develop their 16,000 square foot flagship site ahead of its launch.

Master of Business Administration (MBA) and accountancy are the top qualifications among the UK’s CEOs, according to the annual Robert Half FTSE 100 CEO Tracker.

MBA graduates are leading more of Britain’s top businesses than any other qualification, accounting for 25% of FTSE 100 CEOs, the highest proportion since 2016.  This was followed by Chartered Accountants, who made up 20% of FTSE 100 CEOs, up from 19% in both 2017 and 2018.

Beauhurst identifies the UK’s top Wearables startups, highlighting key sector trends and patterns.

Green Angel Syndicate has backed NatureMetrics, a pioneer in sampling, sequencing and analysing Environmental DNA. eDNA is left behind in the environment by the creatures which pass through it – in water, soil, or droppings, for example.

NatureMetrics can extract minute quantities of eDNA from samples of water, sediment or soil, and identify the species that are present. This technology can be used to identify protected species, such as great crested newts, damaging invasive species such as zebra mussels, and for Environmental Impact Assessments. 

Aergo, a company that has developed a responsive posture support system which empowers wheelchair users, ahas completed an equity funding round with the help of ClearlySo, Europe’s leading impact investment bank. The funding will go towards expanding the team and product manufacturing and piloting.

Envestors, the fintech fundraising company, has announced its community of connected sophisticated investors has grown to 11,000.  Envestors’ ‘Network of Networks’ is a digital community that connects investment networks from across the UK, India, EMEA and China – providing a single access point for scale-ups raising funds.